The wind bites at your frostbitten cheeks, but you hardly feel it anymore, you’ve become so numb. All you see is white surrounding you, and you can’t tell the ground from the skyline anymore. You have a single layer coat on your body, and the cold set in long ago. You feel yourself getting tired… oh so tired.

You don’t know when exactly you collapse into the snow, and close your eyes, but when you wake up, your limbs hurt like hell. They’re slowly beginning to thaw, and as you come to, you recognize the crackling of a fire, and the smell of soup. You lying under a warm fur blanket, and as you blearily sit up you realize you’re barely clothed.

“You’re awake.”

The voice startles you, and you look up, recognizing the man you’ve only met on a couple of occasions. People called him a hermit, because he mostly kept to himself up on a cabin on the mountain, but he seemed kind anytime you talked to him. Carlos, you think his name was. He sits down on the edge of the bed, setting down a steaming cup of something and bringing the blanket up around your exposed shoulders.